Art and the Semiotics of Images: Three Questions About Visual Meaning In the last five years, the Internet has vastly enhanced our ability to display images to each other, and we can now think of ourselves not just as viewers and consumers of images but as makers and users of them ourselves. Indeed, if on the Internet we do not use images, we appear stuck in print culture and oblivious to the possibilities of the new medium. We can of course avoid giving these impressions by including some wallpaper and a few bits of eye candy, without thereby getting very far at all into graphics as a mode of conveying meaning. Schools and colleges certainly offer very little guidance outside of the area of technical communication. At present we have more questions than answers, among which three seem quite fundamental: 1. how language-like are images? 2. how do images and words work when they are both present? 3. how do scenes of people gazing and posing convey visual meaning? I will expand briefly on each of these questions and then take them in order. Some say that images work via a second communicative system, one fully as expressive as natural language, but separate and structured independently of it. Others find visual and verbal meanings more dissimilar than similar, with the visual lacking a kind of determinacy for which verbal language seems better suited. This question of the nature and indeterminacy of visual meaning will be the first point we will take up. The second question is obviously related, namely, how do the two signalling systems work when they are placed together? In principle, visual meanings may be entirely separate from verbal ones, but as a practical matter, we rarely find pure images with no text attaching to them. Some 35 years ago, Roland Barthes wrote of our very common practices of surrounding images with words which help to specify and stabilize the interpretations of particular images: all images are polysemous; they imply, underlying their signifiers, a 'floating chain' of signifieds, the reader able to choose some and ignore others. Polysemy poses a question of meaning and this question always comes through as a dysfunction Hence in every society various techniques are developed intended to fix the floating chain of signifieds in such a way as to counter the terror of uncertain signs; the linguistic message is one of those techniques. Among these "linguistic messages" are captions, labels, placards, guidebooks, brochures, and fliers all bits of institutional apparatuses which select and present texts and images for the public. They are the tools of curators, teachers, and editors. They in turn are parts of an even larger body of institutions and practices which stabilize how images are to be interpreted and used. That is, when an image is used in a textbook or a treatise, we assume it is there to illustrate and support the meanings and information provided by the text. When an image occurs in an advertisement, we assume that it is there to help sell a product, as by depicting an instance of someone enjoying possession and consumption of the product. Thus we have in these standard deployments of text and image the harmonious relations of explication (by text) and illustration (by image). For that reason, many who have dealt with the semiotics of images have based their discussions on images in textbooks and above all in advertising. Barthes did in "Rhetoric of the Image" saying that the intention of the advertising image is anything but elusive or problematic. Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen build their semiotics of the visual on such a stable corpus of adverts and texts, and it is an entirely reasonable way to proceed except that in studying the fenced-in image, some of the signifying potentials suppressed by the standard cases will go unrecognised. Conceptualist artists in recent decades have worked to foreground and overturn the standard canons and to explore possibilities of tension and struggle between images and text. "It could be argued that the heart of Conceptual art in the late 1960s was not, as is often stated, the notion of the artwork being essentially linguistic, but rather the notion that it was simultaneously linguistic and visual. It is certain true that the combination of text and photograph became increasingly its archetypal form" (Godfrey, pp. 301-2). Even the process of labelling itself, which was foregrounded rather lightheartedly by Rene Magritte, has been pushed in disturbingly directions, as Willie Doherty (see Godfrey: pp. 367-72). Relations between text and image whether contentious or harmonious will be the second question we will take up. The standard scriptings of instruction and advertising also allow the viewer to place herself outside the human scenes that may be depicted. Kress and van Leeuwen describe a two-valued relation to people depicted: either they look at the viewer, and so make a "demand" for recognition, acknowledgement, response, or they are not looking at the viewer, and in a sense "offer" themselves for viewing as "third persons" ( Reading Images, pp 121-130.) But artists and critics of recent decades have questioned the innocence of the beholder and for that matter of the subject and artist as well. Once we begin to think in terms of gaze and pose, demand/offer gets complicated in a hurry. Looking, then, is the third question to be taken up. This little survey of graphic signification will draw on painting, photography, and digital graphics, there being no sharp line distinguishing the latter two and all three appearing via reproductions, on the Web. To be sure, some (the "post photography" folks like William J. Mitchell) have argued that the case is quite altered with digitally manipulated images which give up the claim or even appearance of representing some part of the material world, and J. David Bolter and Richard A. Grusin argue for a line of development in Western graphic culture toward pure presentation (unmediated by a representer artist) which culminates in contemporary Net graphics. There is some point to this digital artists take their images where they find them, whether in a box of old photographs, scans of objects sitting on top of the scanner, stock photos, their browsers' caches and we may imagine the gaze of digital taking/making as directed not through a viewfinder or past an easel, but at a monitor screen. But just as we imagine ourselves in scenes of seeing (though at one remove from the photographer's or painter's seeing) we can continue to do so at two removes, perhaps more. One set of very substantial differences remains in the sheer torrent of unvetted images that pour down through the Net neither selected by editors nor labelled and explained by curators nor "shown" and reviewed in galleries. The mass media have already filled our lives with a vast eclectic profusion of styles and meanings, and now even amateurs can display their images on monitors around the world. The danger is not so much of an anarchy of signifying practices, however, as much as a vastly lowered expectation of signification in web graphics. If we do not pause and look and reflect along some of the lines traced here, all the great effort to build bandwidth to disseminate graphics and hardware to display them will have been for naught. 1. The (relative) indeterminacy of image meanings For Barthes and for our discussion, language functions as a medium with relatively explicit, determinate meanings to which the "meanings" of images may on the whole be contrasted. Images "say" nothing they are mute, they make no propositions about the world and for that reason have been valued by modernist poets as a mode of meaning or apprehension that Victor Burgin, ed. Talking Photography (1982) does not use discursive reason. To articulate this difference, I will develop a point suggested by Barthes and noted as well by Victor Burgin, namely that images, like texts, have a rhetoric of arrangements which signify, but there is no syntax that articulates their parts and binds them into a whole. Though pictures are quite different from texts of natural language, they are not wholly different, and many have sought parallels between the two media. Like texts, most pictures are composed of parts, though the parts are bits of image (and perhaps words) arranged on a surface. When the various shapes in a picture wash and flow and blend into each other and the background, they do not seem very much like words, but when they have crisp edges, as for example in the Dada photomontage introduced here, they have attracted the term "word" and their arrangement likened to a syntax. For example, Dawn Ades, in her overview Photomontage (Thames and Hudson, revised and enlarged edition, 1996) says of this famous piece by Hannah Höch "disparate elements, photographs and scraps of text are thickly scattered over the surface, but still remain legible, like words on a page" (p. 30) but a page, crucially, with words arranged on it, not placed in sentences. Further such montage is, as they say, flat, which means that there is no topography of concepts, no arranging into a space ordered by perspective, but only a topology of relatedness conveyed by touching and separation and spatial order. (See John Willats, Art and Representation, Princeton University Press, 1997, p. 13 and c.3.) It is hard to tell what relative size or overlapping indicates. Nonetheless, these placements signify here by contrast, oxymoron, antithesis, and incongruity (catechresis) principally but not by virtue of their grammatical role in sentences. That is, there is arrangement and composition of the parts, and these arrangements signify after the fashion of the artful patterning of words (the figures of words of classical rhetoric) rather than the constructions of grammar or the formulae of logic. Rhetorical signifying is also notoriously polysemous: words arranged in a list, for example, can convey plenitude even to the point of overflowing (epitrochasm), or equivalence, or precise, detailed attention, or hierarchical ordering. And so, we may say, can images. But for language, these rhetorical figures of arrangement are a secondary signifying system; for images, they're all we've got. As long as the meanings we have to convey pertain to objects in space, a graphic display is fully as adequate, perhaps superior to, a verbal description (we often draw diagrams to clarify such meanings). But, as Paul Messaris argues (using syntax metaphorically): as soon as we go beyond spatiotemporal interpretations, the meaning of visual syntax becomes fluid, indeterminate, and more subject to the viewer's interpretational predispositions than is the case with a communicational mode such as verbal language, which possesses an elaborate set of explicit indicators of analogy, causality, and other kinds of connections between two or more concepts ( Visual Literacy (1994): p. xiii). When the edges of the parts are blurry, or they are overlaid and merge one into the other, then figures of identity, duality (amphibole), and metaphor come more to mind. Graphics that do this sort of thing move away from representation of objects in a physical space (with defined light source) toward what Kress and van Leeuwen call "lowered" or less realistic modality they ask to be taken more abstractly as a schematic diagram of the way the world might be or ought to be ideally or is in a certain underlying aspect). Of this well-known self-portrait by the Russian Constructivist El Lissitsky (1924) Edward Tufte says: Overlapping images express a multiplicity of links and metaphors: the mind's eye, the hand of creation, the coordination of hand and eye, the hand and tool, the integration of person and work, the wholeness of artistic creation and, possibly, even a halo for its saintly constructor. ( Visual Explanations (1997): p. 140.) One can only agree with this, but Tufte plunges forward into syntactic metaphor: By showing steps between the ideas in the mind to the reality of the paper, Lissitsky illustrates the process of graphic thinking and creation. Each visual bridge acts as a verb to link up the nouns (mind, eye, hand, compass, image, type, grid, paper) of artistic work. That work on paper then reflects back (via the pointing arrow) to eye and thought. The grid of the graph paper orders both worlds. (p. 141) [...]... we have been working with the modern notion of art as deautomatization as making conscious and evident the grounds of normal day to day viewing through the violation of conventions, some of them conventions of practical graphics and some of them conventions of classical art appreciation On the issues of rhetorical signfication, tension between text and image, and the scene of viewing, we have been able... carries the significance of the graphic far into a spiritual dimension that has little to do with the content of the article, which mostly turns on CYA for corporations If the reader turns to the indicated page and begins to read the article, she likely will be disappointed by the absence of metaphysical grandeur Which is to say that the artist takes the lines out of context and composes a visual meditation... Japan, I hear) fill the position of the cleansers and would appear to represent the not yet realized victory of the market in the sphere of morals (And here they bear their own texts ("Peace" and "Hope") which push even beyond "Fantastic" and "Fabulous" as Orwellian perversions of the words.) The graphics thus mock the words from Templeton's agent by reducing the grand phrases to their practical consequences... of the scene and then connotation the cultural codes and associations of raincoats, FM spiked heels, pinup posture, followed by "rhetorical" patterning of antithesis and repetition), he moves toward explication of the feminist psychoanalytic argument of Laura Mulvey's work (and toward personal themes engaged by the picture) What both Burgin and Stahel ignore is Newton's opening up of the scene of the. .. enlarged.) The placard text in each case seems utterly unaware of the modification Hayden has made to the antique torso and thus enacts the obliviousness of the Western fine arts tradition to the look of bodies past the age of fifty The images are rather small platinum prints done with great care and fine finish, and the exhibition is not a joke or mockery of age by youth or of museum culture by the realities... built on lines from one of Templeton's operatives and is neither explicitly endorsed nor derided in the text of the piece In context, it both celebrates the triumph of world capitalism and outlines the next area for it to annex, namely the realm of moral values On the first two pages, the two spray cleanser containers on the right margin seem to express the result of the end of the struggle for markets... supplicating, the list goes on Well, of course she isn't looking at you, she's looking at the camera, but Wall stands a good distance away from the camera and farther forward (that is a very long cable release he has there) He appears to be looking, off the mirror, at her But the effect of moving away from the camera is to vacate the space of the viewing eye, which is then free for the viewer to fill The central... strongly the impression that we are seeing some part of the world and sharing the view of it with the photographer who saw it in his viewfinder We can very easily be drawn in to imagined scenes of picture making, and a good bit of the meaning these pictures hold for us has to do with how we play out the roles they cast us in These enterings into the scene are by no means confined to photographs; the art. .. fantasizing.) On either version of the basic story, then, there was a moment when the photographer looked into the viewfinder and saw the scene that ultimately appeared in a print or transparency The photographer is thus the first viewer of the scene, and we as viewers imagine ourselves with our eyes at the place of the taking lens where, that is, we infer the lens to be This positioning in the scene is... plump." And so, the butter being gone, the family is dining on metal Although the graphic is a montage of photos, the swastika wallpaper and general absurdity of the actions lower the modality Victor Burgin developed exactly the opposite relation of text and graphic in his political work of the 1970s: here the image is "appropriated" from an advert and the text written on it is social critique or theory . the mind's eye, the hand of creation, the coordination of hand and eye, the hand and tool, the integration of person and work, the wholeness of artistic creation and, possibly, even a. arrangement and composition of the parts, and these arrangements signify after the fashion of the artful patterning of words (the figures of words of classical rhetoric) rather than the constructions. Art and the Semiotics of Images: Three Questions About Visual Meaning In the last five years, the Internet has vastly enhanced our ability to display images to each other, and we